how to treat streptococcus pneumonia

streptococcus pneumonia

If your doctor says you have a sore throat and looking for ways on how to treat streptococcus pneumonia would you be surprised if your prescribed a penicillin shot? Probably not. The penicillin shot involves injecting an antibiotic into you. The antibiotic comes out of the needle and kills the bacterial cells in your body. It kills the streptococcus bacteria in your sore throat, too. But penicillin doesn’t work against bacteria that live on surfaces. They don’t live in the body. If you have streptococcus pneumonia, it lives in your lungs.

Antibiotics do not kill viruses

The streptococcus bacteria that live on surfaces in your body are probably resistant to penicillin. That’s why your doctor can’t just give a penicillin shot. Instead, he prescribes an antibiotic pill. The pill kills the bacteria that live on surfaces in your body. It also kills the streptococcus pneumonia bacteria that live inside your lungs.

But antibiotics do not work as fast against bacteria that live on surfaces as against bacteria inside the body. By the time they kill the bacteria your body has had time to build up an immunity to them. That’s why antibiotics have to be continued indefinitely ways on how to treat streptococcus pneumonia 

Streptococcus pneumoniae, better known as pneumococcus, is a particularly nasty bacterium that lives in the lungs. Most people have pneumococcus living in their noses and throats without even knowing it. Pneumococcus causes a variety of nasty diseases, including meningitis (inflammation of the membranes surrounding the brain) and pneumonia (lung inflammation).

Pneumococcus has a remarkable ability to evade the host immune response. This evasion is one of the biggest reasons pneumococcus is so successful. But it also makes it a difficult bacterium to treat.

Pneumococcus is constantly developing new ways to evade the host immune response. It is constantly changing its shape, shapes that are more or less likely to have proteins from the host immune system attached to them, and are thus likely to be attacked by the immune system. Since pneumococcus never sleeps, it reacts to each one of these changes immediately.

Immune responses are constantly changing, too. Regular immunizations against pneumococcus, using immunizing proteins extracted from killed pneumococcus, have proven remarkably successful on how to treat streptococcus pneumonia, But pneumococcus is constantly coming up with new immunizing proteins, and the immune system constantly has to come up with new antibodies. And some of the immunizing proteins pneumococcus produces are themselves immunizing.

Some of the most effective treatments for pneumococcus involve first killing the bacteria, then using drugs that inhibit the ability of immunizing proteins to kill. But immunizing proteins are produced by one part of the immune system, the T cells and drugs inhibit the activity of another part of the immune system, the B cells. Both T cells and B cells are implicated in autoimmune diseases like lupus

Streptococcus pneumoniae is the most common cause of pneumonia or infection of the air passages. Pneumonia is serious because germs that cause pneumonia can spread from the infected person to others. The use of antibiotics to treat pneumonia dates back to the 1940s. At that time, a pneumonia patient was treated with penicillin, one of the first antibiotics to be made. Penicillin killed the germs and caused no side effects.

But there was a downside for penicillin. When penicillin was used to treat pneumonia, it killed the germs but did not kill the bacteria that caused the problem in the first place. So in 1946, a research team began to develop chloramphenicol, a drug that kills bacteria. Chloramphenicol was useful for treating pneumonia but not in children. Children were especially susceptible to chloramphenicol. Because of this, doctors waited until late 1947 before giving chloramphenicol to children.

By 1950, penicillin and chloramphenicol had been discovered on how to treat streptococcus pneumonia  By 1953, penicillin was routinely used to treat pneumonia. Doctors had learned from penicillin, and from chloramphenicol, how to make antibiotics that were less harmful and more effective.

But penicillin and chloramphenicol were not the only antibiotics around. By 1952, fusidic acid, or streptomycin, had been discovered. Streptomycin works on a specific kind of bacteria, but streptomycin kills many different kinds of bacteria. In 1953, doctors gave streptomycin to AIDS patients, who were dying of pneumonia.